Acer Helios 500 - RAM upgrade

xapim said:

skyrunner86 said:

vanadium said:

Well, increasing RAM speed mostly doesn't result in any performance gain:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_Yt4vSZKVk

It's the best way to waste money. That being said, I was able to overclock the factory Hynix DDR4 2400Mhz to 2933Mhz (21-21-21-43) by modding the bios (to unlock custom memory settings):

https://octoperf.com/blog/2018/09/02/acer-predator-helios-500-mods/#useful-unlocked-bios-settings

The performance improvement was barely noticeable. I'm running 2x16GB G skill 2666Mhz along with the 2400mhz sticks right now, everything at 2666Mhz (19-19-19-43). That's a total of 48GB, with 24GB on each channel.

If you want to fully exploit 3200Mhz RAM, then you will need to mod the bios and remove the factory RAM by entirely disassembling the laptop. Not easy but feasible. You may see 0% to 5% performance improvement.

First of all, i've seen your post before as it came up on google when i was looking for any useful information on this subject. I'm honestly impressed with what you did. If i'm going to do it - i'm not going to do it myself. For 35 EUR a local laptop service is going to replace stock RAM sticks without any hassle. I talked with Acer as well - they told me that replacement of stock RAM sticks will not void the warranty. I do realize that if i go for something higher than 2400 Mhz i will have to mod the BIOS as you did. but what about warranty after modding BIOS? this is another issue. I am indeed worried that it's simply not worth the trouble. Although i hate to see this AMD not to live its full potential. The most sane option would be to buy a set of two 2666 Mhz sticks and get over it.

Modded bios will definitely void warranty lol unless when you send it u had flashed the stock bios first this and if you didn't had any seals in any screw when disassembling it, and (in my opinion) i wouldn't pay any money to anyone to either swap memory, hdd neither even repaste or clean it , i would and always will do it myself because at least i know what im doing and i don't trust anyone else to do it i already saw loads of useless ppl working in tech/repair stores that they do not have a single clue of what they are doing and that really pisses me off lol

I totally expected modding bios voids warranty - i just wondered if reflashing back to stock is all i'd need to do in case i need my warranty. I have some trusted laptop repair stores around and i'm not that confident with disassembling entire laptop by myself. 

vanadium said:

Fitting new ram sticks takes about 5min and a screwdriver. That's not worth 35€.

Honestly, it's more difficult to do an oil change on a car than disassembling the Acer helios 500. Was surprised how easy it was. Also have seen lots of people working in computer repair shops not knowing what they were doing. But, if you find a repair shop who is also capable of repairing damaged motherboards (by replacing damaged components on it), then you know you're talking to experts. Otherwise you're just talking to people who have basically the same skills as you. (except they charge you for this)

Yeah, fitting new RAM sticks into free slots is easy indeed. I could do it myself. They want 35 eur for disassembling the whole laptop to get to factory sticks underneath the keyboard. This is more tricky and i rather outsource such activity.

vanadium said:

This will void the warranty. And I don't see the point unless you only want to run 2x16GB at 2666Mhz, or 4x16GB. I have made benches at 2400Mhz and 2666Mhz on the I7 8750h, there is not much difference. Can be that Ryzen could be a little faster, but don't expert more than 1 to 5% improvement overall, which is imperceptible.

Bios mod can be done without removing the motherboard from the laptop body, which is my mind is safer (only software modification). You can easily run the ram à 2933Mhz CAS 21 then, and have 48GB RAM total.

Yeah I think i'll go for HyperX Impact 16GB [2x8GB 2666MHz DDR4 CL15 SODIMM] 1.2V . I was thinking about 32 GBs but honestly i don't believe i will be ever capable to use more than 32GB. In the laptop i'm currently using i have 24 GB, doing web development using Docker containers including memory hungry ones like elastic search and i never hit low memory problem. 

Just as a final note to this thread.

Currently i have a combination of 2400 and 2666 ram sticks so in the end i'm clocked down to 2400. Or at least i thought so, until i opened CPU-Z where i noticed that RAM frequency was around 900 Mhz. So i opened AMD Ryzen Master and noticed that Memory is clocked down in this application to 933 Mhz. I bumped it up 1333 Mhz, it asked me to restart. I restarted and CPU-Z, showed me 1180Mhz and in Ryzen Master RAM frequency was set to 1200 Mhz. Cool. And this is the moment when i should have let it go, being happy that RAM is running up to max speed without modding BIOS. But then i've noticed that the latency was also set to quite high number (can't remember what). So i entered Game Mode profile in AMD Ryzen Master (CAS latency 13 clocks), i only bumped the Memory Clock to something around 1666 Mhz leaving other settings as they were. Now, i was a little bit afraid but last time it limited me down to max possible value without causing any harm. So i restarted and then i was bombarded by BSODs. I was unable to successfully start Windows, it was a nightmare. BSODs were appearing with many different errors (memory_management, attempted_execute_of_noexecute_memory, critical_process_died, etc.) in various stages of Windows startup. The furthest i've ever made was to see Windows login screen and another BSOD immediately after that. I've managed to run windows in recovery mode with command line but it was no good as i didn't know how to reset RAM settings from command line level (there was no console apps i could run in Ryzen Master directory either to reset the clocking). So obviously the only thing that worked was to disassembly the bottom cover and get my hands on BIOS battery so i could reset CMOS. Lesson learned. This is current memory setting i'm running:



Due to my recent adventure, i'm really reluctant to change anything here. I'll leave it as is. The bottom line is if you have AMD Ryzen version of Acer Helios 500, check out if AMD Ryzen Master settings aren't limiting down your RAM sticks and if you're planning to make any changes here, be very careful.

xapim said:

Hope there is a lesson to learn here do not mix memory which is not the same latency/clocks/brand and expect to work at least at the lowest clocks might not even work and if you try to overclock it it will be even worse u end up by crashing the os

in the future i plan to mod the BIOS and run all sticks at 2666 Mhz, other people proved it's totally doable. it is also way easier to revert the overclocking in case issues like this come up.

conquerator2 said:

So if I want to use up all of the 64GBs of available RAM, is really the max frequency 2133Mhz (without BIOS flashing)? If so, It's difficult to find DDR4 SO-DIM RAMs clocked lower than 2400MHz.

The max frequency without modding BIOS is either 2400Mhz or 2666 MHz. I can't prove which one as i have a mix of stock 2400s sticks and 2666s i purchased myself additionally. Because they're mixed, the faster ones are clocked down to 2400 MHz. With CPU-Z i noticed that all of them are running even slower, but i boosted them up to 2400 MHz using AMD Ryzen Master as you can see in the image i posted earlier. I messed up when i wanted to boost latency, that was my mistake. In the end they're running in dual channel at 2400 MHz with CL17 latency. AMD motherboard can handle up to 3200 MHz (at least AIDA64 says so) but it's not going to work without modding.